Newly-turned 18-year-olds discover Sarajevo, a “bridge” between Europe and the East

 A city suspended between East and West, a city damaged by war, that is now lively and open to the world. On the 2014 “Memory Tour”, newly-turned 18-year-olds from Cunardo, Cugliate Fabiasco and Lavena Ponte Tresa discovered Sarajevo, a city that is a symbol of the conflicts that tore ex-Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, a city on the border between East and West.

The “Memory Tour” is a now well-established and worthy initiative: every year, the three towns in the north of Varese Province promote the tour which takes newly-turned 18-year-old men and women to places which have been symbols of European history, partly funding the “expedition” that visits several European countries.

This year the tour involved 36 young people who were born in 1995, plus a group of guides, including Mayors Angelo Morisi (Cunardo) and Pietro Roncoroni (Lavena Ponte Tresa) and Councillors Pinuccia Mandelli, Paolo Bertocchi (Cunardo) and Omar Algisi (Cugliate Fabiasco).

Sarajevo was the location of a terrible siege that lasted from 1992 to 1996, but it is also the city that, in its rich past and with determination in its present, testifies to the coexistence of different ethnic groups and religions: we need only consider that on a visit to the city centre, we can come across three enormous mosques, two synagogues, two Orthodox churches and one Catholic church. During the siege, the religious buildings were attacked by Serbian nationalists who also fired on the two Orthodox churches, which were even reference points for the people of Serbian origin who lived in Sarajevo; the whole city, a symbol of possible coexistence, was targeted by the nationalists.

Among the places that were visited in order to understand what the siege of the city had been like, the tour also included the “Tunnel of Salvation” (see photo, left), a passage (800 metres long and 1.6 metres high) that connected the city, which was besieged by the Serbian troops, to the free Bosnian territory and to the rest of the world.

Leaving the memory of the siege aside, however, Sarajevo is a city which is coming back to life, albeit with great difficulty (economic problems, for a start): it is a very young city which is reconstructing many buildings, including the famous national library, which was bombed and set on fire, and which was freed from its scaffolding a little more than a year ago.

To understand more about Bosnia today, the group of young people from Cunardo, Cugliate Fabiasco and Ponte Tresa also met Stefano Stucci, the first Secretary of the Italian Embassy in Sarajevo (photo, meeting at the Embassy). Finally, during the long trip towards the city across the mountains, the young people also went through Slovenia and Croatia, on the new ”border” of United Europe.